In 1953, Johnson promoted Stevens to senior engineer and made him manager of the RAMAC project. In that role — and with the contributions of colleagues William Goddard and John Lynott — Stevens led the effort that changed the future of technology.
A team of roughly 50 engineers examined the cumbersome process that computers used to access data, which involved running a stack of hole-punched cards through a machine and shuffling linearly through the data. Other attempts at random-access retrieval had proven insufficient. The team essentially had to draft blueprints while it was building the structure.
“There were problems to be solved,” Stevens later recalled. “But I think for most of the basic problems, we at least had laboratory-level answers. We didn’t have production-level answers. … Questions came up like, how were we going to make that many disks, and how were we going to do the other things related to mass production?”
After four years, the team revealed an historic solution. The IBM 305 RAMAC — or simply RAMAC, as it came to be known — was the first computer to use a random-access disk drive. The team had magnetized aluminum disks by coating them with iron oxide paint. Magnetic spots on the disk represented characters of data, and a magnetic arm, akin to a record player needle, would read the spots as the disks rotated at blinding speed.